Qualcomm’s Spending Buys the Right Friends

Qualcomm just provided the recipe for companies trying to thwart foreign takeovers: Spend big, first on research and development, then on lawyers.

That seems the main takeaway from a letter the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. sent to lawyers for Broadcom and Qualcomm on Monday. That letter, made public by Qualcomm on Tuesday, explains the rationale for a relatively unprecedented move by CFIUS to examine Broadcom’s proposed hostile takeover of Qualcomm ahead of a shareholder vote on the matter. That vote, originally...